The WoodenBoat Forum is sponsored by WoodenBoat Publications, publisher of WoodenBoat magazine. The Forum is a free service, and much like the "free" content on Public Radio, we hope you will support WoodenBoat by subscribing to this fabulous magazine. To get WoodenBoat delivered to your door or computer, mobile device of choice, etc, click WB Subscriptions.

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ. You'll find answers to the frequently asked questions as well as basic rules. No need to register unless you would like to participate, although some images will only show if you are registered/logged-in.

You will need to register
before you can post: click the red register link or the register tab, above, right.

Selling/self promotion postings are verboten on the Forum. To advertise, take a look at WoodenBoat Advertising, or use your Google Adwords account if you want to advertise on the Forum.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by Osborne Russell

For instance?

Two recent DoJ memorandums stating the President can’t be indicted. The Constitution allows for removal from office by impeachment and conviction. No unelected bureaucrat has the power to remove a duly elected President.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. John Fn Kennedy. (D)

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by mdh

Two recent DoJ memorandums stating the President can’t be indicted. The Constitution allows for removal from office by impeachment and conviction. No unelected bureaucrat has the power to remove a duly elected President.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by mdh

Two recent DoJ memorandums stating the President can’t be indicted. The Constitution allows for removal from office by impeachment and conviction. No unelected bureaucrat has the power to remove a duly elected President.

The Constitution provides for impeachment, so what? Indictment ≠ impeachment. Are you saying that since the President can be impeached, he can't be prosecuted? He can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, but he doesn't have to stop at stop signs? Is that the miracle of impeachability, that it makes you immune to the rest of the law?

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by mdh

Two recent DoJ memorandums stating the President can’t be indicted. The Constitution allows for removal from office by impeachment and conviction. No unelected bureaucrat has the power to remove a duly elected President.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

There's a clear Constitutional procedure for removing a president from office, and with the current Congress, Mr. Trump probably could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not be impeached. After the elections, things might be different. But criminal indictments, whether federal or state courts, are another matter entirely, and here we're in uncharted waters. Your claim that Trump is above the law except by a 2/3 vote of the Senate is dubious at best.

A thought experiment: say that Mr. Mueller's team finds clear evidence of a crime committed by the president; let's say some financial felony for which there are very clear records. The Republicans in the House won't impeach - or they do, but there aren't enough votes in the Senate to remove him. Can he be prosecuted? What about in state court, if these are crimes under, say, New York law? As I said, we're in unknown territory; that's the trouble with electing somebody as shady as Mr. Trump.

Last edited by Keith Wilson; 05-16-2018 at 03:58 PM.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled."

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

my simple understanding of this is that even if he murdered someone on live tv, you would have to first impeach him, then remove from office, and THEN you could have a criminal prosecution. so in a way, yeah, the pres is above the law to an extent.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

I don't think that's ever been established. It has some interesting implications. Since every president eventually leaves office one way or another, the prospect of criminal prosecution only at the end of his term might inspire some strange behavior - trying to pardon himself, for example, or even something seriously anti-democratic to stay in office.

Last edited by Keith Wilson; 05-16-2018 at 04:09 PM.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled."

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by AlanMc

my simple understanding of this is that even if he murdered someone on live tv, you would have to first impeach him, then remove from office, and THEN you could have a criminal prosecution. so in a way, yeah, the pres is above the law to an extent.

I think your understanding is wrong.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Tribalism is family and extended family.
Trump is doing beautifully.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

What role does the Supreme Court play in impeachment? No one is above the president? I think the sacred document references WE THE PEOPLE. lots more in that document beyond the right of 18 year olds to buy guns you know.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

The idea that a president is effectively above the law; that if there is evidence of crimes it requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate to remove him from office before he can be tried seem like very, very bad idea. And I would say that no matter who was in office.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled."

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by Keith Wilson

The idea that a president is effectively above the law; that if there is evidence of crimes it requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate to remove him from office before he can be tried seem like very, very bad idea. And I would say that no matter who was in office.

you can't have the president tied up in court all the time. if he's done something serious, he'll get impeached. then he'll get his day in court. how many americans did obama murder in his drone strikes? when is his trial date again?

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

.
What happens inside a meeting with the Special Counsel investigators:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have interviewed dozens of witnesses since his appointment nearly one year ago, but the process is largely the same.

In most cases, witnesses arrive at a nondescript office building in Washington, D.C., a discreet government annex maintained by the Department of Justice. Some have walked right through the front door, in full view of the swarm of reporters scanning the foot traffic, while others have opted to slip through the underground parking garage, where cameras cannot capture their arrivals.

They are typically ushered into a small conference room, greeted by a team of prosecutors and presented with a list of about 100 names.

The first question is simple: ‘Whom do you know?’

A book of photos is used to refresh memories, and as hours of questioning gets underway, Mueller himself has been known to slide into the room to listen, and then just as quietly, slide out.

Little is known about the size, scope and direction of Mueller’s highly secretive probe Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election beyond the clues offered by the few guilty pleas and handful of indictments, but according to one witness, a years-worth of interviews has yielded no small amount of information.

“I'll tell you, they know a lot,” former Trump adviser Michael Caputo told ABC News following his own interview with Mueller’s team. “They have everything.”

A similar story is emerging from these individual encounters. Several sources who have met with the special counsel were asked about specific individuals: when they first met, how often they spoke, what they spoke about, as well as anything they might heard about them. Should a witness not recognize a name, investigators might move on or offer hints, sources said, to jog their memories.

One source who's been interviewed by the Special Counsel told ABC News they'd describe the prosecutor and investigators the person met with as “polite and professional." The source added that investigators they met with made it clear they "just wanted to know the facts."

“They said that we should have no concerns and just wanted clarification," the source told ABC News. The source added that the investigator then made a joke about the use of colorful language in emails the source sent and was being asked about, which made the Mueller prosecutor in the room laugh.

Three former Trump campaign aides – George Papadopoulos, Lt. General Michael Flynn and Rick Gates – have agreed to cooperate after pleading guilty to lesser charges. As part of their cooperation agreements, both Flynn and Gates have met with the special counsel’s investigators at that same Washington office building several times over the last several months to answer questions about their time on the campaign and about other individuals associated with its activities.

Other interviews have taken place offsite. Simona Mangiante, whose husband George Papadopoulos, became the first former Trump aide to agree to cooperate with the Mueller team, said she was summoned to an interview at the FBI’s offices in Chicago, where she was living, and was struck by in her interview the focus of investigators’ questions.

“You are questioned about a single segment of some [topic where there is a] bigger picture that you don't necessarily understand in the moment you answer these questions,” Mangiante said.

Still others, usually those involving witnesses who live overseas, have been conducted in the bowels of U.S. airports after federal agents have surprised them in passport control lines and escorted them to customs offices.

Ted Malloch, controversial author and Trump supporter who lives in London, was stopped in Boston’s Logan Airport and said agents were “extremely professional” and even “humorous.”

“They talked to me for about 50 minutes, and it was actually quite friendly,” Malloch said.

Stephen Roh, a German lawyer with ties to the suspected Russian agent -- a professor who is described in court papers as having introduced Papadopoulos to Russian officials, recounted a far less pleasant interaction in a paper published by the energy firm where he works. Roh wrote that he “was fished from the passport control queue by the FBI and his family was retained with armed police force. There followed hours of interrogation and search by the FBI, a team of Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating Russia-Gate.”

In an email with ABC News, Roh said that while the encounter was “intimidating” to his children, he now considers the entire affair “irrelevant.”

Robert Anderson, a 20-year veteran of the FBI who is now in private practice, said the airport has proven to be a convenient place for federal agents to interview witnesses in a controlled, safe environment.

“It’s a choke point,” Anderson said. “You know someone has to come through there. Once they are in the country they are lost.”
A year into the probe, the special counsel has shown no signs of slowing down. Multiple individuals who have been contacted by the special counsel for an interview told ABC News they are still waiting on an interview date, and other sources said that some witnesses have been told that they will need to return for follow-up interviews.

As Trump’s allies have begun calling for a swift end to the probe, one of his associates told ABC News he believes there is still much work to be done.

“These guys have been doing a lot of digging but I think they're still following leads on things that they're not really quite close enough to yet,” Caputo said. “They have probably more people to talk to.”

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

It's telling that our Trump supporters have now been reduced to arguing about whether a sitting president can face criminal charges without being impeached first. It's possible that a tipping point will come, where a significant fraction of those who support him will realize that whatever the virtues of his policies, they've backed a crook (to put it bluntly), and that Trump himself as president has become a liability, harming the causes they believe in. Or maybe not; maybe they'll defend the guy to the end.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled."

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

CNN)The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a new boss, Dr. Robert Redfield, who ignited controversy because of his dubious qualifications for the job and the over-the-top salary offer that came with it. Initially slated to earn $375,000 a year, Redfield faced questions from Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and last week agreed to work for $209,700 instead.
.
.
Redfield's early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial. As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”
.
.
Suspicious-activity reports are kept strictly confidential, as a matter of law. “sars are secret, to protect the government and to protect financial institutions,” the former prosecutor told me. “I don’t think there’s a safe harbor for somebody who discloses it.” According to fincen, disclosing a sar is a federal offense, carrying penalties including fines of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and imprisonment for up to five years. The official who released the suspicious-activity reports was aware of the risks, but said fears that the missing reports might be suppressed compelled the disclosure. “We’ve accepted this as normal, and this is not normal,” the official said. “Things that stand out as abnormal, like documents being removed from a system, are of grave concern to me.” Of the potential for legal consequences, the official said, “To say that I am terrified right now would be an understatement.” But, referring to the released report, as well as the potential contents of the missing reports, the official also added, “This is a terrifying time to be an American, to be in this situation, and to watch all of this unfold.”

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

And another. Trump seems to have lots of shoes. The Daily Mail is a dodgier source than usual, but the truth will come out. The problem is that there's so much of this, there's a risk of it just merging into the background noise; 'Ho hum, another day, another Trump administration scandal.' (Source)

The Michael Cohen Bribery Scandal Is Now a Trump Bribery Scandal

By Jonathan Chait

Last night, the Daily Mail reported a development in the Michael Cohen saga of seismic scale. In a December 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, the British tabloid reports, Cohen asked Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, who runs a $100 billion Qatari investment fund, to send him “millions” which, the story claims, would go “through him to Trump family members.”

We have already learned of multiple cases of Cohen using his access to Trump to jack up multiple corporations for outrageous sums. The Daily Mail report deepens the trouble in two crucial ways. First, it extends Cohen’s scheme from domestic corporations (or, in one case, domestic corporations controlled by foreign entities) to direct overseas fundraising. Second, and more ominously, it alleges that Cohen funneled the money to Trump’s family. It was bad enough that Trump’s lawyer was enriching himself by cashing in on access. Now the story suggests he was enriching them, transforming the Cohen bribery story into a Trump bribery story.

The story’s publication did not reverberate with the explosive force proportional to the scale of the allegation. The reason is that the Daily Mail lacks the familiarity and credibility of major American legacy media firms. Its occasional bombshell scoops reside in a never-never land between rumor and accepted fact.

And yet there is plenty of contextual evidence to support the charge. One is that, after Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti published Trump Tower surveillance video of Al-Rumaihi, he suspiciously denied attending the meeting, only for his firm to admit it later. Another reason is that, multiple reports have linked both Qatar as a source of players in the broader web of shady Trump financial dealings with Russia, and Cohen as a key conduit. So it would fit the pattern for Cohen to be soliciting a bribe from Qatar on behalf of the Trump family. And yet another reason is Trump’s notorious resentment of other people making money off of him. If Cohen used Trump’s election to solicit bribes, it seems highly likely Trump would demand a taste.

And then there is another reason to credit this allegation: Direct bribery of Trump is still happening, in plain sight.

Trump has defied all modern precedent by retaining control of his family company while serving as president, allowing interests domestic or foreign to curry favor by enriching him personally. One such case occurred this week. In short order, China invested half a billion dollars into an Indonesian infrastructure project that will benefit a Trump property, and Trump then immediately turned around and gave China a curiously favorable trade concession.

What makes the case so suspicious is that, while Trump has repeatedly mocked China and threatened to pick fights with it, the issue at hand involves China engaging in unambiguously bad behavior. ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications firms, admitted to violating U.S. sanctions on both North Korea and Iran. (Ratcheting up sanctions pressure on Iran is now a centerpiece of American foreign policy in the Middle East, thanks to Trump’s decision to back out of the nuclear inspections agreement.) The U.S. Department of Commerce found ZTE also failed to accept the terms of punishment.

But rather than express nationalist indignation, Trump instead proclaimed his bizarre sympathy that the penalties would hurt Chinese workers (“Too many jobs in China lost”), in what has to be the first time Trump has ever evinced any concern about the well-being of the Chinese labor force. His capitulation left China trade hawks apoplectic. “It’s outrageous,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Derek Scissors, a critic of Chinese trade practices, told The Wall Street Journal. “We are giving up on punishing ZTE for the Chinese restoring the trade status quo.”

It is obviously possible that this sequence of events might be the product of pure incompetence. But immediate progression from Chinese payment that benefitted Trump to oddly worded Trump tweet to oddly designed concession to China suggests bribery as a more likely explanation.

What’s clearly true is that the usual restraints against such behavior are altogether absent. There is an old phrase that used to be bandied around the media constantly: “the appearance of a conflict of interest.” Officials were held to this standard, which required them to avoid even looking like they might be tempted to allow their personal interest to influence their decisions. And of course, petty corruption often won out even in the face of this putatively strict public ethic. But it had to travel through a wicket of rules guarding against outright corruption.

The Trump family, by contrast, is operating in a rules-free environment. The appearance of a conflict of interest is not even in question. There are proven conflicts everywhere, and the only question is straight-out quid pro quo bribery. The only authority empowered to uncover the alleged bribes is Robert Mueller.

While federal officials below the level of president are subject to rigid disclosure and divestment rules, the president has refused to disclose his personal financial information at all. In normal times, Congress would immediately hold hearings to get to the bottom of the ZTE deal, which would generate screaming headlines. In this case, everybody has so fully internalized the reality that congressional Republicans will not conduct any oversight over this administration that a serious congressional probe is unimaginable.

Is Trump collecting bribes? Did Cohen collect bribes for Trump in December 2016? What on Earth would stop them?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled."

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

Originally Posted by Keith Wilson

It's telling that our Trump supporters have now been reduced to arguing about whether a sitting president can face criminal charges without being impeached first. It's possible that a tipping point will come, where a significant fraction of those who support him will realize that whatever the virtues of his policies, they've backed a crook (to put it bluntly), and that Trump himself as president has become a liability, harming the causes they believe in. Or maybe not; maybe they'll defend the guy to the end.

keith, you're looking at this the wrong way. trump supporters haven't been reduced to arguing about it. yall are arguing about it, we're just telling you your argument is wrong.

Re: The 2017-present Special Counsel investigation

keith, you're looking at this the wrong way. trump supporters haven't been reduced to arguing about it. yall are arguing about it, we're just telling you your argument is wrong.

That's funny! These words were Rudy's. Are you saying Rudy is wrong?I tend to agree with Kieth's premise here but, I'm assuming that there are some Trump supporters actually have a brain or at best, some common sense.